Bunker Hill

July, Greene was one of his pallbearers, and no bells rang. “It seemed strange,” he wrote.
    “Death has so long stalked among us,” Jonathan Sewall wrote, “that he is become much less terrible to me than he once was. . . . Funerals are now so frequent that for a month past you meet as many dead folks as live ones in Boston streets, and we pass them with much less emotion and attention than we used to pass dead sheep and oxen in days of yore when such sights were to be seen in our streets.”
    Within a week of the battle, General Gage had reluctantly decided, at the prodding of Henry Clinton, that he must proceed with the original plan and take Dorchester Heights. Now that Howe had possession of Bunker Hill, it only made sense to assume control of this last remaining piece of strategically placed high ground, especially since the provincials clearly lacked the gunpowder and artillery needed to defend it. But after going through the motions of putting together a detachment of two thousand regulars for the assault, Gage, fearful that the provincial force in Roxbury was larger than it actually was, abandoned the operation.
    In the weeks to come, Howe’s troops on Bunker Hill constructed an elaborate, virtually impenetrable fort atop the peninsula that had cost the British so many lives to obtain. But Dorchester Heights, even though it overlooked both the Castle and Boston’s South End, remained empty and neglected: a kind of monument to the deathblow that the Battle of Bunker Hill had dealt to the ambitions of Thomas Gage.
    He had arrived in Boston with hopes of snuffing out an insurrection. He now knew that Britain was in for a protracted war—a war against her own subjects for which it was difficult for a British soldier to have much enthusiasm. “We shall soon be driven from the ruins of our victory . . . ,” an officer predicted. “Our three generals [Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne] came over in high spirits and expected rather to punish a mob than fight with troops that would look them in the face; there is an air of dejection through all our superiors which forebodes no good, and does not look as things ought to after a victory.” Before Lieutenant Colonel James Abercrombie died of the wounds he received on Breed’s Hill, he delivered a deathbed speech of sorts. “My friends,” he was reputed to have said, “we have fought in a bad cause, and therefore I have my reward.”
    On the Sunday after the fighting, Margaret Gage went walking with a female friend. As they stood gazing across Boston Harbor at the smoky remnants of Charlestown, Margaret recited some lines from Shakespeare’s
King John
:
    The sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!
    Which is the side that I must go withal?
    I am with both; each army hath a hand,
    And in their rage—I having hold of both—
    They whirl asunder, and dismember me.
    A few days later, her husband penned a letter to secretary of war Lord Barrington. “The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear . . . ,” he wrote. “I wish this cursed place was burned.”
    —
    Joseph Warren’s twenty-two-year-old brother John was in Salem on June 17 when around sunset “a very great fire was discovered” in the direction of Boston. He soon learned that a battle had been fought in Charlestown and that his brother had been in it. After just a few hours of sleep, he left Salem around two in the morning. By sunrise he was in Medford, where he “received the melancholy and distressing tidings that my brother was missing.” He rushed to Cambridge, where each person he talked to seemed to have a different story. Some said his brother was alive and well; others said that he’d been killed. “This perplexed me almost to distraction,” he wrote. “I went on inquiring, with a solicitude which was such a mixture of hope and fear as none but one who has felt it can form any conception of. In this manner I passed several days, every day’s information diminishing the probability of his safety.”
    He knew that the only ones who could provide definitive word were the enemy, so he went to the British line at Charlestown Neck and requested to speak with someone who knew what had happened to his brother. When the sentry refused to help, Warren desperately tried to push his way past until the sentry stabbed him with a bayonet. Bleeding from a wound that would eventually harden into a jagged scar, John Warren returned to Cambridge, where he became one of the